Lab Notebook Guidelines
Laboratory notebooks are a mandatory part of a professional's
toolkit. They are crucial in research work. Often they
serve a vital role in legal disputes over intellectual property.
Even in development or production work they serve to document your
creative and technical developments. In the student environment,
the main purpose of the lab notebook is to
document your learnings. It will help you remember what you've
learned and the instructor will use it as an assessment device.
The notebook is a running record of your experiences in lab. You want
to document what you are trying to accomplish, plans to achieve it, the
technical details of your explorations, and importantly the results,
outcomes, or conclusions. The main characteristic of the writing is
that someone else should be able to completely understand
what you have done. That someone will most likely be you, six
weeks in the future.
In this course there are two kinds of entries: Lab
activities and Project notes. Be
sure to label each entry according to these categories.
Lab Activities
Most of the scheduled lab periods in this course will be structured
activities. You will be given a specific task to perform, a tool
to learn how to use, or a goal to achieve. Simply record all your
problem solving efforts and conclusions in your lab notebook. The
last five minutes of each lab will be a computers-off writing period.
Project notes
Project notes are records of work on your individual course
project. There will be many design decisions, technical tricks,
instructor requirements, and implementation details that you will want
to record. Keep all those documented in your notebook.
Format
Follow these requirements for the format of your lab notebook:
- Use a book with permanently bound pages such as a standard
lined Composition book. Never remove or insert pages.
- On the inside front cover, write your name and contact
information and the course number and section. This way, your notebook
will come back to you if
it is misplaced.
- Number the pages of the notebook (up to about 50) if they are
not
already numbered. Use both sides of each page. Leave two pages (i-iv)
at the beginning for
the Table of Contents. This will be a detailed list of what’s in your
notebook. You should update this after each entry.
- Entries must be recorded sequentially with
no skipped pages. Make entries on both sides of every page – no
blank pages, no large blank
parts of pages.
- Use ink throughout your lab notebook. Write in blue or black
ink
(waterproof ink is a good idea if you have a habit of spilling
beverages on your work).
- Line out errors with a single line. Do not obliterate entries
or use
white-out. Draw a single diagonal line through a whole paragraph if it
needs to be
omitted completely.
- Every entry must have a title and the date. Lab activities
should also indicate your role: driver or coach.
- When you end a session at the middle of a page just draw a
double line (use a straight edge please) that clearly marks the end of
that day’s activities. You
can start your next entry right below that double line. There is no
need to begin a new
page for the new day. (The Table of Contents will allow you to quickly
access a specific entry).
- Do not write lecture notes in your lab notebook.
- Be neat and coherent. Your work must be legible and
comprehensible by yourself and the instructor.
- Don't worry about "organizing" your notebook; it is a simple
chronological record. You may start down one path, abandon it for
something else, then return to it later. That's fine.
- Always keep your notebook up-to-date. The instructor will
randomly check notebooks to be sure they are current.
Scoring
The notebooks will be collected at random during class for
scoring. Each time it's graded the notebook will receive a
numerical score out of 10 points. If you are absent or forget
your notebook on the day yours is collected your score is zero for that
day. The final score for computing your course grade will
be computed as the average of all the separate scores.
Document History
3/25/06 Removed Independent Explorations.
4/3/05 Added "driver or coach" note to lab entries
4/1/05 Added paragraph explaining scoring.